


Their Story

by Caoten



Series: Forbidden [3]
Category: Hiveswap, Homestuck
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Anecdotal Story-telling, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Humanstuck, Life Partners, Old Married Couple, Sad with a Happy Ending, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Time Skips, life story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:28:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25233898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caoten/pseuds/Caoten
Summary: (This is Part 3 of a series, and I’d recommend reading Part 1 (8,461 words) and Part 2 (16,512 words) before reading Part 3. This is the final part!)It's easy to get caught up in your own life and all the problems that it entails, and as a byproduct just as easy to forget that you are not alone in your own story. There are always witnesses — friends, family, acquaintances, strangers — and evidence left behind to prove that you existed even when you yourself are gone.Rose Lalonde and Kanaya Maryam, soulmates and thus far unable to have each other, have spent half a lifetime missing each other at every turn, but a soulmate bond is stronger than our earthly dealings.Inspired by a soulmate AU where your eyes glow when your soulmate is thinking about you: http://lgbtqwritingprompts.tumblr.com/post/180651057245/a-soulmate-au-where-a-persons-eyes-glow-when
Relationships: Rose Lalonde & Dave Strider, Rose Lalonde/Kanaya Maryam
Series: Forbidden [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1265264
Comments: 2
Kudos: 12





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> So! What has it been? A year? Anyway..... I did promise I'd make these lesbians happy, and I will. And that's simply that on that. Also if you're still reading this despite me dropping off the face of the Earth, I love you. Thank you for sticking around, I hope quarantine is treating all international people okay, and that y'all are doing good in spite of the circumstances!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> End of the End.

_ Hello…. Hello? Okay, it’s on, that’s cool. Cool, cool. _

_ So, _

_ Uh, _

_ We’re gathered here today to celebrate- _

_ Or I guess celebrate is a fucked up wording, right? Scratch that, ignore that. Let’s start over. Shit. _

_ So, _

_ We don’t all know each other, but I see quite the bunch of familiar faces here today. But for the fraction of a chance that some of all y’all don’t know who I am, and haven’t figured it out either, by the looks of… Well, me- Anyways, I’m Dave. David. Dave. Yes, Rose’s brother, or cousin, technically. And I’d like to think that I was a brother to Kanaya as well. Though, in a way I guess she was more of a mother. But in a totally not incestous, completely normal kind of way. More of an older sister really, despite the whacked out conditions of us even meeting in the first place. I guess that makes me like a brother to her, after all. _

_ I- _

_ Sorry, I’ll get to it. Just…. Just give me a second. _

_ I did prepare a speech, I’ve been working on it for a long time. We’ve known this was coming, after all, though I don’t think I’m alone in not including Rose in the calculations. She was strong, but I guess her love for Kanaya was stronger, in the end. _

_ Not everyone gets the chance to meet their soulmate, I know I didn’t, and looking at y’all, I think I’m not alone in that sitch either, unless that’s a sensitive topic. Anyways, soulmates. I think we probably cannot understand the weight they carry, but I think we all could see and understand just how much my sister and my other sister who did not have blood relations with each other themselves, uh, how much they loved each other, and needed each other. _

_ So, in a way, I think this really is a day of celebration. Because we know, that they’re together now, right? At least we have that as some kind of worthless bandaid. And if there is no afterlife, at the very least, they don’t have to be separated anymore, like they were for so long here on Earth. _

_ When you think about it, it’s kind of beautiful. Even if it’s painful for us, and believe me, I miss them. I miss them a lot, every second I miss them, and I think I will do so till the day I stop breathing too, but even if it’s painful, it’s poetic in its own, fucked up sort of way. I think. _

_ And, well, that is really all I had to say. And for y’all who knew Rose before she started wrinkling up and greying and sagging- yeah, okay, not all that funny- but y’all know that she was really into the whole death thing. Not like this though, but for the aesthetics of it. So, if no one minds, I’ll be proclaiming myself closest to my sister, and I say… I say that she would probably be happy to know that so many attended the gothest of parties in her honour. _

_ That’s all. Uh, Yeah… Maybe someone should take this away from me, I don’t think I’ll be able to stop now that I’ve gotten the steam up so if someone could- Ah, Yes, please, go ahead, I don’t- _


	2. His Father

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You can spend your whole life wallowing in self-pity and isolation, but you're human, and when family comes a'knocking...

She reminds him of his father.

She reminds him of his father, and not too seldom, a bit too much.

He has not been allowed to enter his bedroom since the morning when she arrived, now fourteen hours prior, yet he has still to hear a single rustling sound or exasperated sigh from within her self-isolation.

In his inner mind’s theatre, he sees his father lying on his bed, arms by his sides and hands clenched into pale fists. Jaw clenched. Shoulders tensed. Eyes piercing the ceiling. His father could stay like that for days, blanching more and more to adopt likeness to a crumpled-up paper. It’s what killed him in the end.

The disease is genetic, it takes different shapes and sizes, and Dave worries that his cousin has taken the brunt of what his father and her mother left behind for them to share.

Dave is sitting in the apartment sofa, holding a video game controller in his hands and staring at the game’s opening screen on the TV in front of him. The colours flash up and down, back and forth, and the turned-down music repeats every half-minute. He has yet to press  _ X _ to play.

The small apartment feels too big with just his cousin there. He wishes Sollux and Equius hadn’t moved out. Besides his birthday half a year ago, it’s been over a year since he properly met Equius. It’s been even longer since Sollux stopped coming by to pick up the things that he’d forgotten to bring with him when he got married.

It sounds pathetic, but he didn’t realise how quiet it felt until it dawned on him that he hadn’t checked his phone for messages in over a week. If he’d had more contact with the outside world, maybe Rose’s sudden appearance wouldn’t have come as such a startling surprise.

Dave slings one arm over the couch backrest, and throws a look to his bedroom door. Pale, cheap wood. More plastic than wood, really. Should he go and check up on her? Maybe just knock and ask her what’s happened? It’s been so long since he properly got to talk to someone, he’s not sure how to do it anymore.

In the end, he doesn’t get up to check on Rose. Instead, he finally presses  _ X  _ to play and tells himself that he’s losing every match because he’s bad at video games, and not because his cousin’s presence is gnawing at the back of his mind the whole time, throwing him off. He’s not able to relax, but that’s nothing new; his amygdaloid function was strung to perfection during his childhood years. Back then, before he moved in with Rose and her mum.

Anyway,

He throws the controller to the side, and it bounces dangerously close to the edge of the couch. He lets out a deep breath, just a lot of air. In part in relief that he didn’t break one of the few pastimes he still has, in part in… He’s not really sure.

There’s nothing else to do. He closes the gap between himself and the door in seconds. He’s nimble for a man his age, not that there’s anyone around to impress.

He doesn’t bother to knock. It’s his door. His room. His apartment. His time. His life.  _ His door _ .

Inside, it’s as though, all the while of the more than a dozen hours during which he’s been locked out of his room, no one’s been there at all. The only sign of occupation is that it is still occupied; perched on the foot-end of his bed sits his cousin, Rose Lalonde.

She raises her eyes, glowing purple, still with the streaks of ghosty pearls, fogged over, pink-hued, red-edged. He feels their warmth reflect in his metallic grey. Ever grey.

His air escapes him.

She doesn’t say anything, but it hangs in the space between them.  _ Hello, _ she greets him with a nod.

“Hey,” he begins.

She urges him to sit down next to her, and so he does, but with a person’s worth of space between them. He feels awkward about it, but it’s the only way to maintain the tense atmosphere that the coming conversation seems to be calling for.

She lets him sit next to her on the bed for a couple of beats; she’s observing the room. That’s a thing that Rose does,  _ observes _ .

Do the near-empty walls and the dirty mirror mean something else to her?

When she takes a shaky breath, followed by a steady one, she has Dave’s full attention:

“I haven’t told anyone before-”

Dave doesn’t want to say anything, anything that could break his cousin’s momentum, but still his mouth blurts out: “Don’t tell me you’re gay. Not under this roof.”

For a moment, he’s afraid that he’s ruined it all just with that joke, that he will have to wait another fifteen excruciating hours for Rose to open up, to let him in through the door, but then a smile tugs at the corners of her mouth.

“Please don’t tell dad,” she says, answering him, before she continues. “Not even Jane, not really, not Mom or you or any friends- Not John or Jade…” she trails off.

She finally says it: “I know who my soulmate is.”

Stillness. Quiet. Then...

“Yeah,” Dave replies.

Rose jolts visibly at that one word, the confirmation, shooting him a startled, almost panicked, look.

He knocks the side of his head. “Eyes.”

“Oh,” she says. Simple. A ghost of a smile touches her lips. “That’s right.”

They sit like that for a while, a couple of feet between them on the old mattress, but the room has already begun to feel warmer.

“It’s not Jane,” Rose says, but then lets out an awkward chuckle. “You already know that, you were at our wedding.”

Dave spent Rose’s wedding day avoiding all attending men except for John; the marriage between two women had made him feel awkward and uncomfortable for some reason. Of course, he never told anyone that. “Yeah, I was,” he says, and continues to avoid any real introspection. “Your eyes were grey as ever.”

Rose sighs. “They were. But not the entire day.” She tilts her head back and blinks rapidly against the lamplight, takes a breath. “I ran into her yesterday. It wasn’t pretty.” She meets his eyes. “I- I had to get out of town. I couldn’t go back home, I just...  _ drove _ .”

Dave looks at her. She’s skinnier than she’s ever been, skinnier than his middle-aged body. Paler too. She has a slight trembling going through her body that he can barely make out, and grey roots are coming out under her dye-blonde hair.

This didn’t start this morning. Rose met her soulmate years ago, Dave realises.

They both know what this is leading up to.

“Just ask me,” Rose says.

Dave nods. He forces her to hold his gaze. “Who is it?”

Rose lowers her eyes. “I can’t.” She exhales, shakely. “Ask me again.”

“Rose, come on…”

She leans forward, leaning onto her knees, puts her hands together underneath her chin, leaning her thumb against her lower lip. Finally, she says: “Do you remember Ms. Maryam?”

A beat passes, Dave takes a moment. Then:

“ _ No _ ,” he says.

“Yes,” she replies, short.

“ _ No… _ ” he says again, but he hears how flat the words fall between them.

It has always been easy for the two of them to find comfort and ease in mutual silence, but this is not a silence which he’d describe as comfortable. Nonetheless, there is nothing to say, and thusly, he says nothing. And neither does Rose.

They both sit on the bed, surrounded by bleak, empty walls and stale air.

So, in this silence that falls, Dave quickly loses himself to his own thoughts, sitting next to his cousin on the bed that he has owned since the day when he moved into this apartment, years ago.

There is a pain in this information about his closest family member, but somehow, it falls easily into place in the archives of his mind. It simply makes sense, but he cannot explain why that is.

The pain that he feels is not connected to the reasons that lie closest at hand; the immorality of leaving her son and wife behind, of her going behind everyone’s backs, not even sympathy with her pain.

The pain is similar in nature to nostalgia, from their best and worst years, from back when he first saw Rose’s eyes turn that entrancing shade of purple. In truth, he knows that it is a violent form of envy that he is feeling. His lonely bedroom walls creeping in ever closer do nothing to raise his dwindling mood and spiralling thoughts.

Rose is speaking again. He hears the words.

The last time he talked with John was over the phone four months ago, on his birthday. The last time since he spoke with Jade was longer, with Rose’s mother further yet.

“I can’t go back home now,” Rose tells him.

He pauses before he answers her, his cousin. He knows that her son — unaware, he censors his nephew’s name — needs her home, and that Jane deserves closure. He knows that whatever it is that Rose and her soulmate — Ms. Maryam, he things, incredulous — have experienced together, Rose staying with him is only postponing the inevitable. Soulmates aren’t steered by choices and needs, it’s destiny.

But her asking him like this, to cover her back and to let her stay with him, if only for a while, she being the only family he has seen face to face in over a year, he can’t deny himself that. He’ll exercise his mental gymnastics later tonight, to justify their decision.

“It’ll be fine,” he says instead, “you can sleep on the couch.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well! Now that we're off, hopefully I'll be more motivated to update it as regularly as I did before! I do have the whole story planned out after all...
> 
> Also, thank you everyone who've left kudos and comments! It really means so, so much! Thank you!


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